K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Time trackers for the console

It’s time for a few more console applications. I had hoped to post a few of these yesterday but real-life chores got in the way, so I had to wait a day.

I have four or five here that are all … I’m not sure what to call them, but I think “time trackers” or “time managers” might be accurate. They all have a time-punch function that can be terrifically useful for anyone who needs to watch time devoted between tasks.

worklog is very straightforward, with an adjustable list of projects that you determine keystrokes for. Press a key to start timing a job and press it again to stop it.

You can increase or decrease time arbitrarily and enter descriptions as well. It’s probably not fair to say this, but worklog is probably what I use mentally, as the generic time tracker application.

There are a few things I don’t like about it; for one, some of the keystrokes you see — like the DEL key to quit — don’t seem to work. I have to quit by CTRL+C.

And the “projects” file has to have its details listed in reverse order, which strikes me as odd, in this day and age. Twenty-five years ago when I had to list things in reverse order on my C64 for it to look right, I just took it in stride. These days, that’s unusual. Maybe the problem is me.😐

Regardless, little points like that make me think worklog is a work-in-progress, and just needs a little more time to mellow.

As I understand it, timebook is python-based while timetrap is a ruby version, and they both have similar structures and functions.

From a strictly superficial standpoint, timetrap seems to have a few more options than its predecessor, but that might just be the benefit of working in the wake of another program.

Personally I see little difference between the two, so you might have to install one, try it out, then install the other and see how each one ranks.

(I notice that they share commands — they both scramble for the “t” command as their default application name — so you might have to unplug one before trying the other.)

For my money both python and ruby applications tend to bog down low-end hardware, and so if I have to make a life-and-death selection, I would probably go with timebook. To each his own though, and if you have a lot of processor power, it won’t matter.

Last but not least is punch, a/k/a punch-time-tracking on Google Code, which works atop of todo.txt, which is a list manager.

I don’t have a screenshot for that one, mostly because I had trouble getting the two to work together. For some reason there seemed to be a disagreement over what the configuration file should be called.

Judging by the examples on the home page though, it appears to work much like the others. If you already use todo.txt, this might be a natural choice for you.

And there you have it. The odd part of this little essay is that few of these are in the repositories for the two distros I usually check — Arch or Ubuntu.

worklog is in the Ubuntu repos for Dapper onward, and AUR has only timebook-hg to speak of. So in that sense, if you’re looking for some very, very easy projects to sponsor, here are a few.

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6 thoughts on “Time trackers for the console”

I just have to remind you of emacs and it’s allpowerful Org-mode🙂.. i’m not sure what’s memory footprint of this combo, but that’s what i use (and i’m twice a month surprised by another unexplored functionality)…